‘To the Wonder’: Last movie Ebert reviewed opens Friday in S.A.

Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder,” which Roger Ebert reviewed two weeks before dying of cancer April 4, opens Friday in San Antonio at the Santikos Bijou theater.

Yes, thanks to the quirks of movie distribution –and the fact that San Antonio is a secondary movie market — we’re just now getting this one, which Ebert saw in mid-March and which opened in some markets April 12.

Ebert’s website editor, Jim Emerson, describes his feelings in editing and posting his colleague’s final review in this moving post.

For the record, Ebert was swimming a bit upstream in his final review. He gave 3 1/2 stars to “To The Wonder,” which has a paltry 42 Tomatometer score — and an even worse 33 among Rotten Tomatoes’ Top Critics.

Malick’s second movie in two years (after “The Tree of Life” in 2011), “To The Wonder” stars Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko (“Oblivion”) and Rachel McAdams in what Ebert describes as “a romance poised between France and Oklahoma, between memory and transcendent desire.”

It’s no surprise that a movie that transcends traditional structure would appeal to Ebert, whose favorite saying was “it’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it’s about it.”

You can find the review here, or read it in Friday’s mySA section (the section formerly known as Weekender). I could have run another critic’s review in print, but using his seemed the right thing to do, even if his analysis wasn’t in line with his peers.

And though he enthusiastically embraced electronic media, Ebert always considered himself a newspaperman first and foremost. So how could I not?